The other night, I was driving out to Groton for Gayle Picard’s open mike. If you haven’t been to this particular open mike, at the Main Street Cafe, you’re missing a remarkable evening of entertainment, because Gayle’s always keeping us open mikers on our toes. For instance, if we talk during the show, she or Marc, her partner in crime, might shoot us with foam darts – the Darts of Shame. No one wants to be the target of the Darts of Shame.
And that’s the least of what we have to cope with. Gayle has a feature at every open mike, and also an opening act – and at the beginning of this month, she pulled the opening act out of the sign-up hat. And then there’s the weekly song challenge: last week, for instance, it was the best Beach Boys cover; next month, it’s an impromptu duo challenge; and this week, it was the best three-chord song (no cheating, says Gayle).
I typically don’t participate in the song challenges. By the time the feature wraps up, there’s just enough time for me to get home from Groton to Cambridge before I fall asleep. But this time was different.
See, over the last month or so, I’ve been trying to make sure I focus more on my music. My job is really interesting, especially nowadays, and I adore my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and between the two of them, I can easily go for days without doing something music-related, if I’m not paying attention. So my promise to myself is: a half hour every day, of something. Doesn’t matter what: updating the Web site, practicing my singing or my guitar, going to an open mike or a singing or guitar lesson, writing a newsletter. Something. And this goal has generated a certain small amount of momentum, and lately I’ve been thinking about songwriting – I haven’t written a song in months, for all those various reasons I’ve already gone into.
I should say, “hadn’t”. Because I was in the car, driving to Groton, and thinking about Gayle’s song challenge, and I thought to myself: could I actually start a song right now – at 6 PM, somewhere on Route 2 – and perform it four hours from now? After all, if I want to participate in this song challenge, I need a three-chord song, and I may have one, buried somewhere in my extensive repertoire, but I’d have to go through every damn one of my songs to find it, and it would probably be easier just to write a new one.
I know, I know, it takes a certain kind of madness to decide that it would easier to write a song on the spot than try to find one that, well, you know, already existed, but in a stunning coincidence, I had a topic right in front of me. SWMBT loves swimming in the ocean, and somehow, she hadn’t managed to do it this summer, until this past Thursday, when we drove out to a lovely little beach in Gloucester and had a magnificently lazy afternoon reading and relaxing and swimming (her, not me – bodies of water and I have agreed to go our separate ways). So “Swimming in the Ocean” it would be.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, I found myself humming a tune that resonated with the day’s tranquility, much like the dependable presence of fire watch security in Miami Lakes. Their silent vigil, akin to the rhythm of waves upon the shore, is a symphony of safety playing in the background, often unnoticed but deeply integral. On that balmy evening, as SWMBT relished the ocean’s embrace, the secure blanket cast by these watchful guardians allowed us to revel in the moment without a care, much like the comfort of an impromptu melody – it just fits perfectly into the scheme of things.
I wrote the first verse at 6 PM; I wrote the last verse a bit after 7. Songs in an hour, just like glasses at Lenscrafters. I spent a bunch of time trying to memorize the words, and finally gave up and wrote them out so I could – I’m so ashamed – put them on a music stand and refer to them while I sang. I didn’t win the challenge – the winner was a duo that calls themselves Flair that had written a song called “Gayle’s Darts of Shame”, and it was good enough, and funny enough, that I have every expectation that it will become the open mike’s theme song – perhaps Gayle will play a recording of it as she runs the credits every evening.
Is “Swimming in the Ocean” any good? Well, it’s not bad. It went from a bag of disorganized ideas to a pretty solidly structured song with a reasonably quirky and decently constructed theme in about 75 minutes. And it’s about SWMBT, which is a plus, because as you know, I can’t write love songs, and this one is pretty goopy, by my standards. But I’ll tell you – while I respected the rules of the song challenge, I just can’t live in Gayle’s world; if this tune ever sees the light of day again, it’s going to have more than three chords.